Monday, 27 January 2014

Global Game Jam comes around once again, that annual event where for 48 hours there is a mass sacrifice of spare time, healthy sleeping patterns, and an outpouring of game based creativity centered around a surprise theme.

This was the theme announced on the Friday, along with an emphasis on accessibility and inclusivity.

The theme, and some sketches on the layout of the environment for out initial idea.

With a good plan for what we wanted our idea to be locked down, we went home on Friday ready to start the actual creation of the game on the Saturday morning. We had lots of complex ideas about player swapping places in order to fix things and having to impart information to each other verbally in order to get the job done, and that core thing is in the final game. Other stuff to do with an interesting kind of rock-paper-scissors relationship between players based on the 6 senses got lost in the mad dash that is game jam.

the view from our bunker jam room at the Bristol Games Hub

By the end of day one I had had a little meltdown over animation not importing animation correctly into unity and we had little visible progress, even though invisible progress had been made in terms of code and design decisions.

Turned out that it was a scaling issue to do with the .fbx file importing the mesh and rig at different scales, so I set my export settings to centimeter (which was technically incorrect) and it worked.

The team stayed up late and by morning Gareth had a functioning prototype, and I had fixed my animation issues and finished the character creation. Video evidence from 2:30am:

Day two was super productive and by the submission time we had a basic playable game that had compromised in all the right places, leaving the best mechanics intact. Team AHOD making important creative decisions:

left to right: me, Eduardo, Gareth.

The game demoed well when it came time to show the other jammers what we'd achieved and it even came away with the best audio award, to Eduardo's credit. Here's the poster I assembled from the assets for the game's upload page

And a screenshot from the game:

It was great coming up with the game design for this, I was lucky to have like minded people to collaborate with and bounce ideas off in a really encouraging environment. I'm pretty pleased that I managed to get so much more done successfully than last year, probably largely down to the team this year and me having more experience than last time.

The game can be downloaded from here for Windows and Mac should you like to assemble 3 players to try it out, and groove to that award winning sound!